Adult literacy: How (and why) to teach using phonics

The evidence for phonics as a tool to teach reading at primary school is well established. But what about using it with older learners? Does phonics work for those in further education? It’s a controversial question.

When ministers announced in 2017 that functional skills qualifications in English were set to include phonics, the decision was met with concern in some quarters.

Critics feared that teaching approaches could be lifted straight from primary schools and dropped awkwardly into the FE sector, and that using synthetic phonics with older learners could infantilise them.

But how well-founded are those fears? And how much do we know about the effectiveness of these approaches for improving literacy in older students?

Gemma Moss is a professor of literacy and director of the International Literacy Centre at UCL Institute of Education. She was lead author of a 2018 report on trends in post-16 phonics teaching, and says that despite research into the use of phonics with older learners being few and far between, there were providers already using the approach.

“In doing our evidence review, it was very hard to find work on adults using phonics, and a lot of what little there was relied on borrowing from primary school research,” she explains.

“There is this myth that phonics is so contentious, nobody in their right mind in the adult literacy area should touch it with a bargepole,” she continues. “But what we found was that there was much higher usage in the sector than people supposed.”

It was, however, often “uncoordinated and insufficiently resourced”, Moss says, with staff having to “make it up as they went along, without sufficient inputs”.

Phonics ‘wasn’t talked about in FE colleges’

Sam Duncan, associate professor in adult education and literacies at the UCL Institute of Education and co-author of the 2018 report, agrees that while it may not feel like phonics usage is particularly widespread in post-16 settings, it has been present for a long time, particularly in classes of students with lower literacy levels. “It’s not that phonics wasn’t used and suddenly is, but more that it wasn’t talked about that much,” she says, adding that this could be because some overlook the fact that colleges cater for students who are just beginning to learn to read.

“The controversy about the introduction of phonics into functional skills was mainly from people who weren’t teaching those beginner levels, and who just saw it as weird,” she continues. “The people who were teaching those more beginner levels already had an appetite for more [phonics] materials.

“In my experience, people teaching at those lower levels have either made up a bit of their own phonics approaches … by developing their own phonics knowledge, or quite a few have been ex-primary school teachers and they’ve adapted things that have been developed for primary schools. It’s been uneven.”

So, what is the right approach to phonics in FE? Duncan says there tends to be “a lot of sensitivity” within adult literacy teaching about not being seen to do “primary school stuff” or “anything that could seem patronising to adults”.

It is crucial, Moss says, to understand the “diversity of aspiration” among adult learners. And it is particularly important to be aware of this when working with students who have very low levels of literacy at the outset.

“Adult learners at the lower levels will have full competence in other things,” she says.

“So they’re fully able to communicate with you. But somewhere along the line, they’ve missed out on phoneme-grapheme relations. If you take that as your starting point, how do you teach them?”

The answer, she says, is not to take a primary-inspired approach, using tools such as “early reading materials that have nonsense sentences”. Instead, it is important to begin by understanding why literacy is of such importance to these older learners - those reasons can vary significantly from person to person - and then tailor the language learning to their needs.

“In one class I visited, there was a person who wanted to be a bus driver, and she was debarred from applying because she couldn’t read any of the road signs. That was her motivation,” Moss says. “Another person’s motivation for joining the literacy learning class was that she wanted to be able to read the text messages her kids were sending.”

Can the research offer some tips on what to do after you have ascertained this motivation? According to The Simple View of Reading Redux (Tunmer and Chapman, 2012), skilled reading involves the ability to decode words accurately and understand language.

So, there are various reasons why an adult might be a poor reader: poor word reading, poor language comprehension or a combination of both.

There is plenty of research to suggest that a lack of phonics knowledge is likely to underpin poor reading in primary-aged children and, while much thinner on the ground, there is some evidence that this is also the case in adults (Tighe and Schatschneider, 2016).

There is also evidence from neuroscience that adults learn to read in the same way as children (Dehaene et al, 2015). But does that mean that phonics approaches will actually work with post-16 learners in practice?

Jo Taylor, a lecturer in language and cognitive development at University College London, says that there are some “good reasons to expect a phonics approach to be successful with adults”.

“Some research has been carried out in the US showing that adults with poor literacy skills improve on decoding following phonics training,” she says. “But other studies have found reading fluency interventions to be just as successful.

“However, the research base is weak, since attrition rates are often high, outcome measures are often not directly linked to skills trained in the intervention and there are very few studies in the UK context.”

Rachael Hulme, a research fellow in psychology at Aston University, recently led a study evaluating whether family learning phonics courses are effective for improving parents’ literacy skills. She found some evidence to suggest that phonics can improve skills, such as letter-sound knowledge and decoding, in adult learners.

“The focus of these courses is on teaching parents about how their children are taught to read in school, as well as targeting their own literacy skills, focusing on letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, and decoding and blending,” she explains.

“We found improvements in parents’ letter-sound knowledge following the short six-week course, but other literacy skills - phonological awareness, decoding, whole-word reading - did not improve following this short intervention and may need longer-term support.”

So, the jury seems to be out on just how effective phonics approaches could be at post-16 level but, with phonics becoming a part of functional-skills qualifications, colleges will need to get better at delivering it regardless.

Diane Gardner, head of applied research in adult literacy for the Citizen Literacy project at City of Glasgow College, believes that one issue potentially preventing the effective use of phonics in FE colleges is a lack of practical resources for learners over 16.

“There were no resources for me to use professionally, as a teacher, to teach phonics to adults,” she says.

“There were plenty of children’s resources for the wee ones but there was nothing for the older students.”

Gardner decided to address this. In partnership with colleagues at the college, she developed the City Phonics approach, designed to teach adults to read and write. This led to the development of a Citizen Literacy app: the first designed specifically for older low-literacy users (see box, above). Work to review the app, and to further develop it for wider use, is ongoing, although it is already being used in colleges across the world, and Gardner has plenty of anecdotal evidence that demonstrates its value.

“One person who used it could not read and write at all when she started, and then a couple of weeks ago, she sent me a video of herself in her local shop in Nottingham - a shop she had been going to for about 30 years - and for the first time in her life, she was able to read the sign with the name of the shop on it.

“As teachers, that’s what we want,” Gardner says. “We want what we’re doing in class to make a difference to someone’s life.”

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 16 April 2021 issue under the headline “Phonics boom shatters post-16 literacy myth”